The Invasion, also known as The Youyan Sixteen Prefectures Battleground, is a 40 on 40 map that can be referred to as a Dota-like. There are 3 lanes, powerful bowmen npc that act as towers, bases to capture, waves of npcs, and carts to run. It takes 30 people in queue to start a round.

In order to join you will need to find the invasion menu. You can click on the NEW button at the top and find it in there, or click on MORE in the bottom right, find the horn, and join through that menu. You have two options, solo queue and team queue. You can not join as a raid.

The objective is to kill the enemies general, but you can not do that until you kill the officers. You can not do that until you kill the inner bowmen, and you can not do that until you kill the outer bowmen. Picking up the stat buffs and organization are the keys to winning.

The game is divided into two periods of game play. Prep time and Game time.

Prep time
In Prep time, you are given time to do anything you normally would except there are no npc waves that spawn. The game states that if you kill wulin masters that champions should spawn with your waves during game time, but we have yet to see this happen. This period is also when it is easiest to gain stat buffs.

Carts can be run during prep time or game time, but these are rather important. You will find bases nearby on the map with flags, and you will need to run these carts so that you can get larger waves. This is unconfirmed yet, but it seems you need to have more carts run than the total wave number in order to get bonus troops to spawn.

Wulin masters are npcs that are at the bases. There is generally one for your team and the other team. Sometimes you can get them to fight each other if they are close enough. To not underestimate these guys. They are as hard as some higher dungeon bosses. An organized group, an emei with buddah / egg, and music is advised. Killing them adds to your score and should spawn champions in the waves, but we haven’t seen any champions yet.

Every base but one can spawn carts. There are 3 in the north and 3 in the south. Some cart paths run right past enemy bowmen and would be advised not to take. In either case, denying the enemy carts and bases helps you out. It makes their wave size smaller if they have less carts, and if you have more bases, it will allow you to spawn cannons or trebuchets that will do aoe attacks.

There will be colorful orbs spawning on the ground any time you defend a point, capture a point, run a cart, or defeat bowmen. These are color coded to what stats they will give you.
Red = Brawn
Yellow = Balance
Blue = Breath
Green = Stamina
Purple = Spirit
Every time you pick one up you gain battle chi and upon reaching 300 battle chi you can not pick any more up. You can be selective on these and only pick up the ones you want. If you don’t use breath, don’t pick up the blue ones.

Game time
Once the prep time is over, npcs start to spawn in waves. These guys can stun, but are easily defeated by most people but they do help with taking down bowmen. Given the entire game and being unmolested, the waves of npcs can not destroy an entire group of bowmen, so you will need to help out. The divine bowmen hits hard and should be battled like the wulin masters. I can not stress enough that if you do not work together, you are not going to win a match.

There are 3 paths on this map. The northern path goes from the northern most camps of ming and mongolians. The two larger camps for ming and mongolians spawn npcs in two different directions. One that goes to the south around the lake and the other that goes directly for the enemy camp.

Each team has a 3 bases. The third base is where the general is and he can not be attacked until the officers in the other two bases are defeated. The archers in each base provide a damage buff and armor to the officers / general of that base. For the larger bases that spawn waves in two directions (mid and bottom) you will need to kill all the divine archers on both lanes to remove the officers buffs.

If you win, well, we don’t know what you will get. But so far people have gotten 20-30 tokens for how well they did in each match from ties. You will only be rewarded for the best match you do each day and you will get these rewards at reset.

There is a twin sword set that is for sale in major towns or inside the instance. It is called the Drifting Cloud Sword set. Even though it says twin blades on the books and the skills, it requires twin swords to actually use. Chinagame.exe.

The set costs 50 tokens to buy page 1’s and 30 tokens to buy each page up to 6. This will cost 350 tokens just for all the page ones and 1050 tokens to get them all to 6. This comes out to 1400 tokens. If you just play to tie, this will take 47 days of playing once a day and getting rank 1. Or you could win and possibly get this faster.

The set looks like it has some cone stuns, knock ups, and has a black graphic that follows all the swords. More on the set later.

Tips
The NPC waves will not defeat the bowmen by themselves given the entire game time and being unmolested. So going behind the enemy bowmen to kill their troops ahead of time does nothing.

The game says that the commander npcs can beat the war machines that spawn, that the warmachines beat the waves, and the waves beat the commander npcs. We have yet to see a commander npc in a wave.

Be selective on what stats you pick up. If you do you can get +1350 to your damage stat.

Treat this like a mid to high end dungeon.

Figure out who is leading the raid and get assist if you have arrays you can drop.

If you idle you will be kicked out and can not join for 10 minutes.

It takes 30 people to start an instance.

Swapping a point with the enemy team will not gain you as much as actively playing.

The main camp everyone attacks, middle, has 4 archers protecting it. Destroy all 4 archers or you will be there for a long time.